The Taqwacores (26 page)

Friday the twentieth of December, jumaa full of wooly Muslim punks. From the back row they looked like an outer-space carnival, each an epic in his own right with comic book haircuts and unknown band names everywhere in white on black—patches or painted on leather, dangling chains and spikes. At the door collected a mountain of army-surplus combat boots and Doc Martens like these bass players and drummers and singers went tromping through Chechen wastelands fighting on our behalf.

Fatima sat next to me.

“Where’s Jehangir?” she asked.

“I haven’t seen him but it’s really packed in here.” With the taqwacores added to our usuals there was barely room to breathe and my sujdahs would unavoidably fall upon someone else’s heels. Muzammil Sadiq kept his khutbah quick for our physical comfort. Packed in real tight we witnessed a five-minute monologue all in English about how when African Muslims came to Mecca the Prophet allowed them their native drums and dancing and spots and it made them no less Muslim than the Arabs. Jehangir would have liked it. My eyes scanned the characters but couldn’t spot his big orange mohawk. We stood up. Noting the Star of David more than once in the row in front of me, it hit me again how truly weird this whole scene was. Would have made as much sense to see the guy on my left just burst into flames and the one on my right grow a second head like Surrealist Dada Imam Dali Islam. Somebody gave a stiff iqama. Then Muzammil led us through the prayer—in English. At first it didn’t sound right.
In the Name of Allah, Most Gracious, Most Merciful.
What the hell was that? But I can say it wasn’t that big a deal, what with all the house’s daily heresies. What really got me was the fact that before that Friday, I never knew what ’Sami Allahu liman hamidah” meant.

I waded my way through all the people to the front porch, stood out there shivering with my hands in my coat and my shoulders hunched cold, and I saw Jehangir coming down the sidewalk with quiet sad holy steps enveloped in white jalab, his drooping head haloed in white turban—the tail dangling down his back.

“I had to park around the corner,” he said, warm exhalations escaping in gusts out his mouth.

“Where’d you go?”

“The masjid.”

“Why’d you go there?”

“It’s not so bad.” As he went up the steps his eyes resigned to my feet. He spoke slow as though disoriented. “Nobody knows me there. I just did my thing and left. Felt good to just be a regular old Muslim.”

“I could see that.” Pause. “Isn’t it cold in just a jalab?”

“It’s ass-cold. But the masjid was warm.”

“Right.”

“You know they say Neil Armstrong’s a Muslim?”

“Neil Armstrong?”

“First man on the moon.” His words weighed more with the visibility of his breaths. “They say that when he was doing his
that’s one small step for man
thing bouncing on the lunar surface, he heard the adhan.”

“He did?”

“No. They made it up.” He stood with stoic vigor though the air must have been like ten thousand cold knives in that thin white cotton. He said it again. “They made it up.” I looked up at the sky thinking then would be as good a time as any for Elijah Muhammad’s Motherplane—or the Mahdi, or Isa or whatever it is you’re waiting for.

Umar’s truck drove by blaring Qari Abdul-Basit. Maybe ten minutes later he came walking up the street.

“All these taqwacore vans,” he said.

“Yeah there’s nowhere to park,” Jehangir concurred.

“Where did you go?” I asked Umar.

“I went to jumaa with Bilal’s Boulder.”

“Which one?” asked Jehangir.

“MSA over at school.”

“How was it?”

“Al-hamdulilah.”

“Where’s the band?”

“They’re sleeping at the masjid tonight.”

“I went to the one in Amherst,” said Jehangir.

“Really?” Umar replied with surprise.

“Yeah, it was pretty cool.”

 

 

We went inside. Jehangir flew upstairs while I delicately pushed my way through the house, catching tidbits of everyone’s mini-khutbahs as I passed. Fasiq ran his game to a white girl with jet-black hair and a Bouncing Souls t-shirt about how the Qur‘an never specifically forbade hashish even though it was around at the time. Just by his posture and coolness and her enthusiastic replies I knew he’d get it, something at least. Then I overheard Amazing Ayyub’s escalating objection as Rabeya ran down all the awful things Ayatullah Khumayni said in his
Tahrirolvasyleh,
how you can have sex with a baby but are financially liable for any internal damage you cause and you can bang a ewe if you kill it after squirting. I thought Ayyub would kick her in the teeth but I kept going and passed some liwaticores, Muzammil right there in the middle talking about alternative readings to the Qur’an and how maybe
Lut’s people weren’t punished exclusively for being gay but perhaps for robbery or something. Right behind them Umar reminded a skin that the Prophet cursed effeminate males and males who pretended to be females.

“And Rasullullah
sallallaho alayhe wa
salaam said that he would rather fall from the heavens to the earth than see another man’s awrah.” The skin just nodded. “You know what the
awrah
is, brother? It’s the place between your navel and your knees.”

With a violent yank the skin undid the button on his jeans, flung down the zipper, pulled out his junk and swiveled his hips so it flapped around, making crazy eyes with his mouth open the whole time and ugly tongue wagging. I instantly thought Umar would kill him but in fact he just stood there, eyes gaping and jaw dropped. The skin put his thing away and disappeared into people. Passing Umar, I looked the other way.

 

 

That night, I believe, we were ready to change the world. No matter how drunk and stupid everyone got, the pervading feeling was
hope.
Jehangir had succeeded in bringing his taqwacore from the West coast to the East and there they all were filling my house with empty bottles and urinating in buckets or off the front porch because both bathrooms were constantly occupied. Jehangir had shed his jalab for the usual gear, but remained somewhat aloof amidst all the carrying-on. I looked at him and missed the happy drunk Jehangir who hugged everyone, loved everyone, put his arm around everyone and sang buddy-songs no better than the beer would allow him. I missed it as though Jehangir had been ripped from me tragically, unfairly, stolen away in the night as a lesson of how mean life could be.

“Shit,” he said standing on the stairwell—I sat on the same
step—with a look of sadness for the carousing taqwacores. “There’s all these ayats and hadiths against making divisions in your religion, and there’s going to be seventy-two sects of Islam at the end of the world but only one can be right... what if we’re just another of the wrong sects? Who’s to say we won’t fuck things up, in our own way, as much as the Taliban?”

“We’re not hurting anybody,” I replied. “This whole scene is just obscene gestures and idol-smashing. It’s not like we’re denying people education or health care.”

“It’s like the fuckin’ Imam of Manassas said,” continued Jehangir, ignoring me. “He said not to form the
farga,
you know, the groups. That’s why I wanted Bilal’s Boulder here. Yeah they’re cocks, y’akhi, but this isn’t a sect. Please, please Allah, I know You have no reason to listen to me because, I mean, look at me—I’m shit—but please don’t make this a sect.”

 

 

“The night before the Tragedy,” a wasted Ayyub explained, “Rasullullah appeared to his widow in a dream. He was all weeping and pale with grief n’ shit. She asked Rasullullah what made him so sad and he fuckin’ said, ‘I have been digging the graves of Husain and his companions.’”

 

 

Saturday, December twenty-first. Kullu yawmin’Ashura.

Somebody rose before the sun, I don’t remember who, but he climbed gingerly over bodies waking up whoever could wake up and we made wudhu in the kitchen sink and then moved the table to pray right there because it was the only part of the house with any space left on the floor.

There were only nine or ten of us to the jamaat. At least a few of them hadn’t even gone to bed yet. Jehangir was there, and Dee Dee Ali, the others a mishmash from various bands. Jehangir and Dee Dee Ali politely bickered, each trying to get the other to lead before Jehangir finally announced a brilliant solution.

“How ’bout we
both
lead?”

“How the fuck would we do that?” asked Dee Dee Ali.

“We both stand up in front, an’ we both do all the Allahu Akbars.”

Dee Dee Ali looked at Jehangir Tabari with the look of
you old codger, I should have expected as much
time-blessed friendship that had adventured in years and years and survived numerous social circles and traveled the world. They had something, the two of them, and you couldn’t touch it. Anything they did went beyond concerns of making sense. What’s so great about making sense? Why not two imams? Rock it out, two best friends standing together to lead a gang of rejects through two rakats.

Dee Dee Ali shook his head, put his arm around Jehangir and together they walked to where the imam would stand. I proudly gave the iqama, but quiet enough so as not to bother the sleeping.

The two imams looked at each other unsure and gave a roughly synchronized Allahu Akbar. It was a clumsy prayer: Jehangir and Dee Dee stood feet-to-feet, the rest of us feet-to-feet behind them as they darted looks at each other to stay together. I’m not sure if it really worked but it happened and maybe it never happened before in the whole history of Islam. After the salaams Jehangir looked up and pointed out to Dee Dee Ali all the spots of water damage in our ceiling. Dee Dee Ali laughed the hearty kind of male laugh suggesting that maybe life could beat death.

“So how’d you do?” he whispered to Jehangir.

“What do you mean?”

“I saw you with the guitarist from the Infibulateds. Anything
happen there?”

“Shit,” said Jehangir. “We were talking and went into my room. She’s looking through my records, we talk some more and then it’s on. You know? It’s fucking
on.
It gets to the point that I’m wondering where this is headed, so I’m like ‘what are you up for?’ And she says, ‘I’m up for anything.’ So I think about it and shit just snaps in my brain. I pull away from her and I tell that girl to go in the bathroom and make wudhu.”

“Are you serious?”

“Shit yeah. I don’t know what possessed me to do that, but that’s what I fuckin’ said. I told her to go make wudhu because neither of us had made Isha yet. So she just looks at me like I’m nuts but she’s too drunk to really piece it out, so she gets up and goes to the bathroom while I just sit on my bed wondering what the shit is going on. Took her forever to make it, it had to be drunk-wudhu. When she came back I stood up and said I had to make wudhu. So she sat on my bed and I went to the bathroom. When I came back she was passed out.”

“Holy shit.”

“So I told Rabeya what happened and Rabeya had me go downstairs back to the party while she stood guard in front of my door the whole night, protecting that girl from whoever.”

“Damn.” They both sat there awhile in prayer posture. “Hey Jehangir, whatever happened to Hi My Name is Allah?” I raised my tired head. Jehangir turned to me, knowing he’d have to explain.

“Hi My Name is Allah was a band,” he said. “It was
my
band. I played guitar and sang.”

“Why’d you call it ‘Hi My Name is Allah?’” I asked.

“It was the most blasphemous thing we could think of,” he replied. “But then, if you think about it, instead of being a prick right off the bat... it really wasn’t so bad. It was like al-Hallaj.”

“Who?”

“Al-Hallaj. Abu al-Mughith al-Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj the Sufi saint of Baghdad. He was one of the Sufi Drunks, you know, the ones who got so intoxicated with Allah’s Presence that it fuckin’ annihilated their sense of self. So al-Hallaj he fuckin’ yelled out ‘I am al-Haqq!’ and all the assholes came out of the woodwork to get him. Put him in jail for fuckin’ years, put him on trial, called him an apostate and a blasphemer. How can you say you are al-Haqq, right?
Al-Haqq
is one of Allah’s Ninety-Nine Holy Names. Are you saying you’re Allah?

“But al-Hallaj didn’t give a
fuck.
Not even when they found him guilty and tortured him to death. He just took it all and asked Allah for their forgiveness.” I looked at my hands, then the floor. I was almost too tired to take all of it in. “You know what they call al-Hallaj today? ‘The Prophet of Love.’ So anyway, we had a band, called it ‘Hi My Name is Allah.’ It was a spiritual, beautiful thing but at the same time had that whole punk ethic of alienating people.”

“So what happened to the band?” I asked, repeating Dee Dee Ali’s question.

“I can’t sing.”

“That’s bullshit,” snapped Dee Dee. “You can totally fuckin’ sing.”

“Yeah,” I added, knowing that his drunken crooning left much to be desired in range and technique but carried the charm that really mattered. You couldn’t
not
listen to Jehangir and you couldn’t
not
love him.